There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s title tells us we should expect wry humor and irony in these 17 short stories. They are set in ironically coveted post-Revolution Moscow apartment buildings, divided and subdivided into tiny units, shared by hardly affluent citizens. Yet these people carry on in unexpected and convoluted love relationships. Translator Anna Summers tells us that the four sections of this latest collection, which encompasses Petrushevskaya’s earliest and latest stories, include:

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s title tells us we should expect wry humor and irony in these 17 short stories. They are set in ironically coveted post-Revolution Moscow apartment buildings, divided and subdivided into tiny units, shared by hardly affluent citizens. Yet these people carry on in unexpected and convoluted love relationships. Translator Anna Summers tells us that the four sections of this latest collection, which encompasses Petrushevskaya’s earliest and latest stories, include:

glimpsed romances in their earliest stages (“A Murky Fate”);
the twisted and accidental circumstance in which families are thrown together;
parents struggling to raise children without murdering each other (“My Little One”); and
mature romances that have run their course or have been realized in a new form (“A Happy Ending”).

According to Summers, the thematic center is maternal love—“the only kind that must survive if families are to endure.” But the mothering may be of an old deranged man (“Tamara’s Baby”) or of a difficult husband once he becomes helpless (“A Happy Ending”). In the ironically entitled “Hallelujah, Family,” the seductress sister-in-law girl gives birth to a girl who in time continues the pattern so that we have eventually four generations of women giving birth to females without the benefit of marriage.

Petrushevskaya knew such people from her life in these apartments. The “follies and cruelties of post-Soviet society” are summed up in the Russian word byt, which means “waiting in line for basic goods, from potatoes to winter shoes (‘Young Berries’); it means inflation that robs old people of their savings (‘A Happy Ending’): it means alcoholism . . . poverty, inhumane laws and a shortage of housing.” These “domestic stories of fringe characters . . . offer a cast of pathetic characters barely holding themselves together . . . their lives [are] their claustrophobic apartments, their ungrateful children, their sick parents, their frustrated marriages.”

This may sound depressing, yet these stories are not grim. In fact, many are not just ironic but happy. For instance, the first story, “A Murky Fate,” starts us off smiling with the characters. A woman asks her mother to vacate the apartment so she can have a lover visit. The lover insists on two things: wine and cake. As soon as he comes in, he heads for the cake, eats most of it, drinks some wine, does his business with her, then goes back to the cake and leaves. But in spite of not continuing their affair, both are smiling at the end.

Most stories end very differently from what is expected at the start. In the beginning of “The Fall,” the “we” narrator notices a guest at a resort: “We couldn’t ignore her—she was too vulgar. We overheard her laughter . . . everywhere. Just imagine her: a tight perm, plucked eyebrows, gaudy lipstick, a miniskirt, new platforms. It was all cheap and tasteless but with an attempt at fashion.” She attracts:

A pack of admirers representing every breed. . . . At the head of the pack parades a tall one in a heavy wool suit, despite the heat. . . . He is followed by a potbelly in a shapeless tank top; next comes, incongruously, a skinny youth with hippie locks; and the procession is finished by a runt in a tracksuit.

This opening does not forecast the realization at the end, a sad one—lovers “deceived by the promise of eternal summer, seduced and abandoned.”

Many stories contain humorous passages, such as one character in “Like Penelope” having to correct translations like “a passerby passed by” and “he was sitting on a seat.” Deprivations are made funny when exaggerated in order to convince an apartment dweller to let someone move in. And more dark humor is found in the “Ali Baba” story: “She wanted to tell them, for example, about the first time she took pills, when she went blind for twenty-four hours. The second time put her to sleep for two days, but the sixth time she woke up in the morning fresh as a daisy.”

Not all of the stories have an uplifting end, but readers cheer for the resilience of these people, who somehow turn a new corner, and life begins again.